the leaf under her pillow.

"You will not die until tomorrow," said the doctor. "You have a night
before you."

"Ah, what happiness!" exclaimed the poor girl. "A winter's night--it
will be a long one."

Jacques came back. He brought a muff with him.

"It is very pretty," said Francine. "I will wear it when I go out."

So passed the night with Jacques.

The next day--All Saints'--about the middle of the day, the death agony
seized on her, and her whole body began to quiver.

"My hands are cold," she murmured. "Give me my muff."

And she buried her poor hands in the fur.

"It is the end," said the doctor to Jacques. "Kiss her for the last
time."

Jacques pressed his lips to those of his love. At the last moment they
wanted to take away her muff, but she clutched it with her hands.

"No, no," she said, "leave it me; it is winter, it is cold. Oh my poor
Jacques! My poor Jacques! What will become of you? Oh heavens!"

And the next day Jacques was alone.

_First Reader_: I told you that this was not a very lively story.

What would you have, reader? We cannot always laugh.

It was the morning of All Saints. Francine was dead.

Two men were watching at the bedside. One of them standing up was the
doctor. The other, kneeling beside the bed, was pressing his lips to the
dead girl's hands, and seemed to rivet them there in a despairing kiss.
It was Jacques, her lover. For more than six hours he had been plunged
in a state of heart broken insensibility. An organ playing under the
windows had just roused him from it.

This organ was playing a tune that Francine was in the habit of singing
of a morning.

One of those mad hopes that are only born out of deep despair flashed
across Jacques' mind. He went back a month in the past--to the period
when Francine was only sick unto death; he forgot the present, and
imagined for a moment that the dead girl was but sleeping, and that she
would wake up directly, her mouth full of her morning song.

But the sounds of the organ had not yet died away before Jacques had
already come back to the reality. Francine's mouth was eternally closed
to all songs, and the smile that her last thought had brought to her
lips was fading away from them beneath death's fingers.

"Take courage, Jacques," said the doctor, who was the sculptor's friend.

Jacques rose, and said, looking fixedly at him, "it is over, is it
not--there is no longer any hope?"

Without replying to this wild inq